Traders pushed up the share price of Memphis Grizzlies owner Robert Pera’s tech company Tuesday, a day after a Wall Street activist called the New York-based tech business a fraud.

Ubiquiti Networks Inc.’s stock price closed at $50.62 per share on Monday and on Tuesday rallied by noon to $52.21 before closing at $50.75.

Wall Street activist Andrew Left, whose Citron Research firm profits when the stock price of companies it invests in falls, released a report Monday that alleges Ubiquiti makes up numbers for the financial reports shown to the public.

Pera, a reclusive engineer from California, dismissed Left’s contention on Monday, calling Citron a band of “clowns.”

Financial news sites, trying to make sense of Citron’s report, pointed out similar contentions were aired years ago.

The clash with Citron is the latest controversy involving Ubiquiti and its 38-year-old founder and chairman.

In August, Ubiquiti settled a 6-year-old class-action lawsuit, agreeing to set aside $6.8 million for defendants, including a pair of pension funds. The defendants alleged that Ubiquiti at the time it sold shares of stock to the public in 2011 had not sufficiently disclosed threats to profits posed by counterfeiters and potential intellectual property thieves in Asia.

Ubiquiti filed 60,000 pages of documents in the case and agreed to the settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.

In June, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a default judgment against Yu-Cheng Lin, a former Ubiquiti executive in Taiwan accused of insider trading. The executive, also known as Believe Lin, was ordered to repay about $7.3 million

Citron cited Ubiquiti’s high margins, potentially shady distributors, high staff turnover and Pera’s decision to “clear out” of the headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

Pera relocated to the 27th floor of an office tower at 685 Third Ave. in New York. The 31-story building was completed in 1962 and is in a part of Manhattan reported to have mid-market rental rates.

In covering the activist’s attack on Ubiquiti, the news site MarketWatch reported, "While Left’s report pokes holes in Ubiquiti’s business, some feel Left is hyping what is already known about the company and using it as a cudgel on Ubiquiti shares.’’

“A bare-bones organizational structure, which mostly lacks sales and marketing and has a frugal approach to research and development expenses, allowed the firm to drop prices on its wireless equipment far below competitors."

“This unorthodox business model,” Kundozerov wrote, “rests upon cultivation and heavy reliance on its online community of dedicated customers; the company fosters collaboration between its engineers and active community members. Moreover, Ubiquiti relies on the community for technical support and evangelization of its products.

“While this model has led to solid profitability in recent years,” the Morningstar analyst said, “the lack of a robust organizational structure is a bit of a concern, particularly in terms of corporate governance, where the company has faced a couple of embarrassing missteps.”

The latest misstep, disclosed in 2015, was the loss of $46 million through wire fraud attributed to a person in China.

Ubiquiti's FrontRow.(Photo: Ubiquiti Networks)

Pera bought control of the Grizzlies, a franchise in the National Basketball Association, in 2012. The year before he had sold shares of stock in Ubiquiti to the public. The initial public offering raised $105 million.

At that time, the tech firm's annual sales were just under $180 million. On June 30, Ubiquiti reported quarterly profits surged 21 percent to $257.5 million on revenue of $865.2 million.

Pera owns 71.4 percent of the stock in the tech company, which sells wireless routers and other electronic equipment, including an online camera.

Forbes, a business magazine, on Monday night reported Pera's net worth had declined by almost $250 million to $3.1 billion after the accusation by Left.

Citron, based in Beverly Hills, Calif., did not respond in public Tuesday to the controversy brewed the day before. The investor’s largest success involved the plunging stock value of Canadian drugmaker Valeant Pharmaceuticals. In October 2015, Citron accused the drug company of using independent pharmacies to inflate profits. Once trading for more than $257 per share, Valeant’s high-flying stock quickly tumbled. It traded Tuesday at $13.73 per share.

Citron is one of more than 1,200 firms that profit by betting share prices will fall. They are known as short sellers.

The process works like this: In the case of Valeant, Citron finds a shareholder willing to loan a share of Valeant stock for a fee. Citron borrows the stock, sells it on the stock market for $257, waits for the stock price to fall, then digs into the $257 and buys a new Valeant share at the lower price. This share is returned to the owner who loaned Citron the stock. Citron pockets the difference, which means if the stock fell to $250, Citron made $7 per share.

Citron is one of an array of short sellers awaiting Ubiquiti's fall in share value. About one-third of the shares of stock issued by Ubiquiti and not held by insiders are controlled by short sellers like Citron betting the stock price will decline.

Among the large institutions investing in Ubiquiti is the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System for public employees, which owned about 933,500 shares in Ubiquiti on June 30, according to a report in Financial Times.